Page 367 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

angled passageway to the exit, where we paused to allow our eyes to
adjust to the harsh mid-morning sunlight. As we did so, I took the
opportunity to look over the pyramid itself, which had fallen into such a
crumbling and thoroughly dilapidated state that its original form was
barely recognizable. The core masonry, reduced to little more than a
nondescript heap of rubble, was evidently of poor quality, and even the
facing blocks—some of which were still intact—lacked the finesse and
careful workmanship demonstrated by the older pyramids at Giza.
This was hard to explain in conventional historical terms. If the normal
evolutionary processes that govern the development of architectural skills
and ideas had been at work in Egypt, one would have expected to find the
opposite to be true: the design, engineering and masonry of the Unas
Pyramid should have been superior to these of the Giza group, which,
according to orthodox chronology, had been built about two centuries
previously.
62
The uncomfortable fact that this was not the case (i.e., Giza was ‘better’
than Unas and not vice versa) created knotty challenges for Egyptologists
and raised questions to which no satisfactory answers had been supplied.
To reiterate the central problem: everything about the three stunning and
superb pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure proclaimed that they
were the end products of hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years of
accumulated architectural and engineering experience. This was not
supported by the archaeological evidence which left no doubt that they
were among the earliest pyramids ever built in Egypt—in other words,
they were not the products of the mature phase of that country’s
pyramid-building experiment but, anomalously, were the creations of its
infancy.
A further mystery also cried out for a solution. In the three great
pyramids at Giza, Egypt’s Fourth Dynasty had reared up mansions of
eternity—unprecedented and unsurpassed masterpieces of stone,
hundreds of feet high, weighing millions of tons apiece, which
incorporated many extremely advanced features. No pyramids of
comparable quality were ever built again. But only a little later, beneath
the smaller, shabbier superstructures of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasty
pyramids, a sort of Hall of Records seemed to have been deliberately
created: a permanent exhibition of copies or translations of archaic
documents which was, at the same time, an unprecedented and
unsurpassed masterpiece of scribal and hieroglyphic art.
In short, like the pyramids at Giza, it seemed that the Pyramid Texts
had burst upon the scene with no apparent antecedents, and had
occupied centre-stage for approximately a hundred years before ‘ceasing
operations’, never to be bettered.
Presumably the ancient kings and sages who had arranged these things
had known what they were doing? If so, their minds must have contained

62 Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 36.

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